Plays of the 00s: Goodnight Children Everywhere

I happen to have read Richard Nelson's Goodnight Children Everywhere while re-perusing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's seminal theoretical opus Anti-Oedipus, in which the authors maintain that post-Freudian culture insists upon incest as its founding prohibition in order to privatize our contexts for thinking about law, taboo, and possible anarchy within the framework of the individual and the family, instead of framing these notions more lucidly in the social terms of power, capital, production, and domination. Furthermore, by positing incest—something very few people desire—as that which must be avoided at all costs, we overcompensate with discourse about scapegoated desires we may never have harbored, displacing coherent attention away from more foundational threats to modern culture that might actually rally an angry crowd of insurrectionists: social revolution, radicalized sexual desire, and demolitions of false ideas of "personal" identity, individual fantasy, discrete subjectivity.

Goodnight Children Everywhere, though it's tense, moody, and delicate enough to prompt an involving production, is the kind of art that, in exploring the "dangerous" idea of incest, may actually avoid exploring what's more deeply at issue in the stories of four siblings, now ages 21 to 17, who have spent five years apart after three of them were evacuated to different sites to escape London during the Blitz of World War II. Now it's 1945, the war is over, their parents are dead, and the most distantly deported of their brood—young Peter, shipped off to Canada—is returning to live in the old family flat with his three sisters, and with the husband of the middle sister, Ann. Ann's husband, Mike, is 30 years older than she is, a doctor, and a friend-provider to all three sisters, including 21-year-old Betty, who works as one of his nurses in surgery, and 19-year-old Viv, an attractive would-be actress. You can hardly fault the sisters for not quite knowing how to pick up the threads of their former life, or whom to recognize as an adult and whom to indulge or instruct as a child. You can see that Nelson has worked out from the idea that, in the wake of a national trauma, the naturalized relationships of parent/child, elder/youth, brother/sister, and father/employer are badly scrambled, and the dynamics of family and sexuality stop feeling like shared, stabled geometries, diffusing instead into a spooky, unsettling, unbounded question.

Still, I have to agree with the Village Voice reviewer that Goodnight Children Everywhere "feels like a conceptual working-out of this question, rather than a play drawn from actual life." When Ann makes her first erotic advance toward Peter, in a scene that might work better as heightened ritual than as spontaneous reality, the script seems on the cusp of a stage direction like, Audience gasps, in the way some films and performances pause for a few self-satisfied beats after a punchline that seems sure to score. Much of what follows in Goodnight Children Everywhere is so handed over, subliminally but hardly subtly, to the frissons around the Peter-Ann relationship and to the riddle of how this pairing will affect the rest of their close, tiny circle that almost no other relationship in the script breathes or fills out as much as it could. It's not a question of missteps but of steps not taken, and perhaps of Nelson investing more in broadly conventional figures of Abandonment, Transgression, and Confusion than in the particulars of his own imagination. In a way, Nelson's success in writing four complexly playable and basically plausible youths—a welcome rarity on any stage—makes us crave comparable specificity and detail in story development, historical context, or thematic and psychological undertones. He has contrived some artful dialogue and some interesting palimpsets of overlayed emotion, but he hasn't followed through on any of these needful frameworks. The play has fewer emotional ramifications than it might (the finale doesn't help) and even fewer intellectual implications. What creative "give" there is in the script would fall mostly to directing careful, exacting turns from young performers, to fixing on the proper pace and range of moods, and to the overall atmosphere of the stage: portentous, I would imagine, but not obviously or overbearingly so. A cracking production might well have the audience leaving with an insinuating vibration under their skins; it's harder to imagine a production good enough to get the audience gripped in the who's, what's, and why's of these particular people and this particular scenario.

Its limitations notwithstanding, Goodnight Children Everywhere impressed enough people to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2000—basically London's equivalent of the Tony, and as narrowly West End-focused as the Tony is Broadway-restrictive, which means that Children, like many a Tony champ and nominee, reached this apogee of critical awardage years after several audiences had already experienced it. Because they are awarded in March, the Olivier Award in a given year, like the Oscar, also tends to celebrate work that really made its impact the year before; the production that earned Nelson his gong opened at the Barbican Theatre in February of 1999. Consequently, by most counts the most esteemed new play on English stages in 2000 wouldn't qualify for the Olivier Award until 2001. It won, and it constitutes the subject of my next write-up.

Plays of the 00s: Copenhagen

Art about science, even terrific art about science, and especially art about scientists, faces the same lurking threats as art about artists: that the promised engagement with the principles, the complexity, the mystery, and the urgency of the science will be totally sunk into a frustratingly stolid and anthropomorphic dumb-gaze at the man or woman who performed all the famous labor. Working to avoid that pitfall of boring externalization can lead into a different but potent problem of how to avoid twee correlatives where the structure or the narrative of the piece mirrors the structures of the science. These kinds of mimetic devices are often smart at communicating what's at issue in the story, but they teeter on a very slippery slope leading to derivative or diagrammatic art.

Michael Frayn's Copenhagen is a ghostplay in which the posthumous spirits of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, his wife Margrethe, and Niels' notorious pupil and mentee Werner Heisenberg rehash the particulars and debate the implications of Heisenberg's tense and mystery-shrouded 1941 visit to the Bohrs' home in Copenhagen, amid his country's wartime occupation of theirs. Heisenberg is most famous for his "uncertainty principle," a theorization of how even the most empirical studies of particle behavior are essentially destabilized by the contexts of human observation and by the necessarily refractory modes of observing the particle's behavior via the traces or reflections it yields with respect to some other surface, usually light. I'm sure many people could offer a superior thumbnail sketch of Heisenberg's famous claims, but few would do it as deftly as Michael Frayn. Though his script brims with high-level scientific and theoretical discourse, Frayn makes this talk not just lucid but dramatically punchy and ethically provocative: it's a major accomplishment of his play that its rare slips into clunky exposition stand out so pronouncedly from a general field of persuasively impassioned, implication-heavy arguments about what, to most of us, is the head-scratching arcana of electron behavior, uranium processing, subatomic measurement, and jockeying for institutional prestige.

Still, with Heisenberg as a protagonist, you just know the play will delve into Uncertainty as a larger paradigm and conundrum. This kind of thematic extrapolation transpires at a range of levels in Copenhagen and in a multitude of ways that are not always as congruent as the play might suggest. Amid the velocity of dialogue and the gripping density of suspense, it's easy to confuse narrative gaps (what really happened? what did these men, especially, really say to each other?) with psychological enigmas (what could motivate these characters to act as they did?) with philosophical quandaries (can we ever really grasp our own behavior, or can it only be read as it impacts others or dictates events?). Frayn tackles such a prodigious set of riddles—physical, molecular, biographical, ethical, temperamental, historical, domestic, procedural, pedagogical, lexical, cultural—and streamlines them into such a fluid, economical structure of three characters in triangulated conversation, occasionally opening out with asides to the audience, that it feels somehow stingy to carp at all about Copenhagen's achievements. The play endows a truly meaningful contest of wills and ideas with a vital dramatic structure; it presents scientists not as walled-off esotericists but as morally invested and historically pivotal figures who feel deeply about what they do. Marvelously, though a live audience wouldn't know this, the script has the astonishing dramaturgical grace to forego almost a single stage direction. How's this for uncertainty: with almost every line in Copenhagen weighted with so many meanings and possible inflections, batted among three characters who have every reason to love, defend, pity, resent, and abjure each other, Frayn refuses to tell his actors how to speak a single utterance or mark a single emotional transition. He also frees his directors and designers to visualize this three-way standoff however they see fit, emphasizing either the Huis clos boundedness of the exchange or the worldly contexts of what's historically at stake or the numinous backdrop of rumination from beyond the grave. (From heaven? From hell? From oblivion? One wonders...) Put another way, Frayn confers remarkable dramatic freedom upon material that might easily have tilted into micro-managed and relentlessly footnoted diorama.

I loved the play. I admit to having turned the pages pretty breathlessly, especially through the first act and toward the end of the second. The third quarter of the play is prone to a fair amount of repetition, and it's laden with a lot of encyclopedic reconstruction that occasionally falters as dialogue, but even then, you never lose the heartbeat of the piece. Still, there is something slightly coy, maybe even flattening, about the implied parallels between particulate behavior and human interaction, and between the mysterious whats of the Bohr-Heisenberg encounter and the even more profound whys. These vulnerabilities in Frayn's conception tend to emerge most worryingly in relation to Margrethe, partially because she's such an obvious audience surrogate and convenient dramatic device as the resident non-Nobel Laureate. "But put this in plain language for Margrethe!" the scientists repeatedly remind each other, telegraphing just why Frayn needs the character, and cargoing some uncomfortable shivers of dumb-it-down-for-the-girl chauvinism. I also had my doubts about the interpolation of a belabored skiing metaphor and, even more gratuitously, of a terrible sailing accident that cost the Bohrs one of their children. This latter invocation embodies such a cheap way to condense the riddles of cosmic uncertainty and molar regret into the maudlin archetype of the dead child; eventually it invites qualified but still risky connotative analogies with the deaths of millions (of Jews, of Europeans), possibly with the apocalyptic death of everyone, via the atomic bomb, which is more thematic freight than this private calamity can possibly be asked to support.

But let me follow those caveats with a statement of how brave and richly satisfying it feels to read a story that furnishes itself such a detailed and specific platform for asking the terrible, cosmic, nuclear-age, "What does it all mean?" questions that lie at the heart of Copenhagen. Many a mopey, narcissistic drama has invoked these kinds of questions on infinitely flimsier premises, as though a short-cut to dignifying one's own navel-gazing or private fears is to link them to nightmares of annihilation or the specters of genocide. Frayn's characters, both because of what they did (and didn't do) and because of how they think and how they argue, put compelling human frameworks around the kinds of gigantic questions that can so easily sink a play, or fire it off irrecoverably into the realm of pure abstraction. Like its three personages, Copenhagen is smart, articulate, and disciplined, subtly humorous but appropriately sober about its subjects. It might be a little too neat, even in its expressions of unknowability and of abyss; not every passage has been fully translated out of the kind of lab-speak and historiographic diction from which Frayn has mined his sources. But the famously successful London and New York productions proved what the script augurs so powerfully: that Copenhagen makes ethics compelling in their very severity; that stories of science offer fertile grounds of drama and mystery, partly because the motives and protocols of science have been so disastrously marginalized and mistranslated into popular consciousness that a portrait this taut and this real has the kick of revelation; that the vagaries of history are fundamentally connected to the vicissitudes of human behavior and self-consciousness, even if I'm nervous about them being dramatized as something close to the same thing; and that audiences are deeply responsive to unabashed moral argument and intellectual history when they aren't slagged off as the preoccupations of eggheads and stuffy effigies, and when an artist as gifted, tactful, and disciplined as Frayn is in charge of relaying them for our benefit.

It's now a very close three-way question in my mind whether the elegant depths and historical urgency of Copenhagen, the exuberant deconstructions and nuanced burlesques of Dirty Blonde, or the claustrophobic compression and haunting archetypes of True West most deserved that 2000 Tony Award for Best Play, but two things seems clear: that it was a pretty banner year for that category and for spoken drama on Broadway, and that plays this rich and strong don't need to be seen in the flesh to be powerfully suggestive and deeply enjoyed.